Sometimes for Love
B.A. Van Sise
My grandmother and I are at her kitchen table, eating wonton soup and egg foo young and little greasy fried egg rolls from a flyblown windowless Long Island take-out place erroneously called China View, as it certainly is not one and does not offer the other. It’s 1996, it’s a warm summer evening, and the woman in the house next door is having some incredibly noisy sex.
In fact, from the sounds of it, she’s being pounded into oblivion, an obnoxious maelstrom of violent coitus, and she’s screaming and moaning and wailing like she’s hosting a bachelor party for whirling dervishes.
We know her.
She’s the registrar of death certificates for the town. When not doing whatever it is she’s currently doing, she sits in a little fluorescent office day in and day out waiting for people to die, which they do with some consistency. A mortician brings in a form, Diane stamps it, and henceforward another citizen shall be, officially, dead forever.
Her husband periodically grunts like he’s picking up an oversized ham from the freezer aisle. We’ve seen him up close, and smelled him from a distance, and know he’s no prize.
And so Grandma and I sit there, eating our egg rolls, wishing the driveway was a bit wider, or that Diane and Richie had closed their windows, or that this would all be over just a bit more quickly. And then off she goes again: OH GOD OH GOD, OH GOD she shouts into Richie’s sweaty sternum, as if The Lord God Almighty, King of the Universe, is in any way involved in the matter.
Every bit the model of young teen angst. I roll my eyes, offering a theatrical aside to nobody in particular: “What in the world is she doing?”
My grandmother puts down her food, letting the falling cadence of ugly fucking fill the room. “Sometimes,” she says, “when you love someone very much, you fake it.”
The closest I came to god was at 2 a.m. at Montauk. I was 17 and my best friend, with whom I was deeply in unrequited love, had asked me to drive her at sunset to a convenience store to buy beer. She turned to me and asked, “Hey, have you ever been to Montauk?” referencing the famous lighthouse 100 miles east. With a nervous spitter, I fibbed.
“Me neither,” she sighed, almost in a whisper, and for 90 minutes I ran every red light from our hometown to the Atlantic Ocean just to see a black and white lighthouse that had been there forever and wasn’t going anywhere at all. Soon before long, it became too late to drive back and she suggested that we sleep there, right there, on the roof of my rusting Dodge Intrepid. At 2 a.m., just as we were falling asleep, her little finger touched my little finger and her breath was the only thing between me and the stars.
The closest I came to god was on a dark road in Cambodia. Alexandra and I had crossed over the border from Thailand by foot because no transportation would go any farther. I bartered at the border with a man equipped with a car, and a passing acquaintance with the English language, to drive us three hours into the jungle to the hotel where we’d supposedly had a room. An hour and a half into the drive, he stopped the car on the side of a road, turned off the engines, turned off the lights, and stretched out in the absolute inkblack of a nation that hasn’t been able to pay its electric bill since the day electricity first arrived. For fifteen minutes he sat there, silent and extended, as we asked him again and again what was going on, why he’d turned off the engine, why he’d turned off the lights, why we were stopped, and he ignored us, and ignored us, and occasionally chuckled to himself. Finally, a small sedan began to roll up behind us, its headlights slowly painting the backs of all of our heads as it rolled to a stop and Alexandra screamed in absolute panic while the driver laughed and laughed. A man stepped out of that sedan and walked slowly up to our window as I told Alexandra that she had no reason to worry: it was going to be fine, that I would fight him, that I would win. The man tapped on the glass with the back of two knuckles. “Come with me,” he smiled, “other driver and I split the trip. Is too long. He go halfway from one side, I go halfway from the other.” We sat in his car, in dusty silence, all the way to a perfectly normal long night’s sleep.
The closest I came to god was when Emily asked me to marry her. It was all I’d ever wanted. It was all I’d ever need. And when her father said he’d only agree to any of this if I’d convert from Nothing to Orthodox Judaism, I said Yes, of course, I’d be happy to, because it was just as easy to not believe in the God of the Jews as it was to not believe in all the other gods. I’d need to speak to a rabbi, I was told, and I’d need to get circumcised, which I already was. The rabbi patiently, and hopefully, explained that the covenant of the tribe I’d loved into was not the procedure but the pain, and that it would be enough to have someone take a scalpel and make an incision on the head of my penis. Her father tapped me on the shoulder and said “If you could do this, I could forgive you even if you killed a man,” I wondered if those terms included him.
The closest I came to god was on the President George Bush Turnpike outside Plano, Texas, where Anna had just broken my heart in the bar where she worked. She told me that she did not love me and had never loved me and would never love me even though she did and had and would forever and we both knew it. A half hour later, driving down that expressway, a man named Horace Broadway driving an 18-wheeled tractor-trailer out of Missouri wasn’t watching where he was going and, while merging into the right-hand lane, shattered the back half of the cheap rented Chevy Malibu I’d been driving far too slowly. My car spun off the pavement and swung through the 20-foot gap in the highway’s soundproofing wall, coming to a stop with its driver unconscious. When I awoke, two Texas state policemen and a traveling couple who’d seen the accident were standing over me, stunned I was alive. “Are you alright?” the trooper asked, “Is there anyone you want to call?” I looked at him square in the eye and told him that I was, and that there wasn’t.
The closest I came to god was in St. Ignatius Loyola Catholic Church on the Easter Sunday after my grandmother’s next-door neighbor had signed off on my mother’s death certificate. My grandmother always sat in the same spot—fourth pew, on the right—and loved to take me down on early Sunday mornings to listen to the tall-hatted bishop give a lecture. She’d insist that we’d sit bolt upright in our pew, backs far off the wood paneling, because better posture meant a bigger singing voice, and a larger sound was surer to please God. On that Easter Sunday, we sat in the usual spot while the priest droned on and on with some ridiculous story about how, thousands of years ago, a man had risen from the dead and even though none of his friends could recognize him, it was surely the same man, and that this was an absolutely true story. It was there, at that moment, that I realized that, in fact, there is no god, and that no one comes back from the dead, and that when you sign a death certificate the person is dead forever, and that none of this, none, is real.
I sat there, my relieved and newly weightless body slumping back against the pew, as the priest closed his sermon and invited us all to song. And so I sat back up, rigid as a razor with my back far off the birch, holding my grandmother’s hand as I sang along with her, at the top of my lungs, as loud as I could— because sometimes, when you love someone, you fake it.
B.A. Van Sise is an internationally-known photographer and the author of the award-winning visual poetry anthology Children of Grass. His visual work has previously appeared in the New York Times, Village Voice, Washington Post, and BuzzFeed, as well as major museum exhibitions throughout the United States. His written work has appeared this year in Poets & Writers, the Southampton Review, Eclectica, and elsewhere.